The connection between a wireless terminal and a network element of a wireless wideband communication network is generally established via an air interface. The air interface can be a wireless wideband system compliant with the IEEE 802.16 or Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard. The wideband wireless systems, apart from the unicast communications, may also provide multicast and broadcast services to the wireless terminals. The broadcasting mode uses the network capabilities to send information to all destinations without congesting the network capacity, using either broadcast channels or different world routing methods. A more controlled approach is reached using the multicast mode, as it transports the packets to a group of destinations simultaneously, delivering the message over each link of the network only once and creating copies only when the link to the destinations split.
The wireless terminals may receive several versions of the same packets or frames within a multicast and broadcast zone from several base station transmitters. This can be used, for example, for multimedia broadcast and multicast services. The terminals may take advantage of the plurality of packets using the principle of macro diversity and thus improving the reception quality of the signal. In this context, terminals always need to know which resource entities are synchronized and which are not synchronized in order to correctly perform measurements of the reference symbols.
There is therefore a need for a method of resource allocation for multicast and broadcast services, a wireless terminal, and a computer program product for performing the method in accordance with the invention.